This invention relates to a method of updating, maintaining and verifying electronic mail (email) address information for various contacts stored in a database.
In the past, people have maintained contact lists on paper. The proverbial xe2x80x9cblack bookxe2x80x9d is a good example of a list of individuals and their contact information. Unfortunately, it is not uncommon that upon attempting to contact someone one discovers that the information is no longer accurate. This is of tremendous inconvenience, especially during emergency or time limited situations. Unfortunately, the task of maintaining a large contact list current is often too onerous for the few times one need to contact each individual.
Therefore, whenever someone changes address, phone numbers or any other piece of contact information, there is a necessity for them to provide their contacts with the most current contact data. Conventional methods of accomplishing this task include sending updated information by email, via facsimile, or even by telephoning to contacts in an address book and making, others aware that some information has changed and they need to manually update their contact list, which is time consuming.
A service offering automated updating of electronic contact information and ensuring most current contact information is offered by PeopleStreet through their World Wide Web site PeopleStreet.com. PeopleStreet addresses the difficult task of enabling people to stay connected to their many circles of contacts. The service provided by PeopleStreet manages the personal information and provides a dynamic link to all personal and professional relationships. This is performed by providing a method for each user to update their own address book entry, thereby automatically updating all the other user contacts of their new address book entry, wherever they may be.
Although the service that PeopleStreet provides does automate this tedious process, it does require that each party is a member of the service. In this manner information is updated from and to all parties subscribed to the service. This facilitates updating your personal information and being updated of others. A shortcoming of the method is that members of the address book, which are not already subscribed, still have to manually inform the subscribed user of their updated contact information according to the prior art updating method.
Contact.com also offers a similar type of contact service, which provides for the exchange of personal information. Once again, subscribed users decide which of their contacts are privileged to which information fields and as a result when the contact changes their personal information all the other address books linked to the contact are updated. This form of service requires the information to be stored on a central storage system. Although security may be strictly enforced, there are still security concerns because all personal information is accessible from outside the server.
Of course, when using email applications, a user is typically notified when a mail delivery error occurs. As such, the user is apprised of a possibly erroneous email address. The user must then proceed to try to correct the address or locate another valid email address. Once corrected, the user can only access the corrected address through their address database. Unfortunately, this is both inconvenient and prone to error. As such, it is generally a nuisance when email addresses expire or change.
It would be highly advantageous to provide a method for updating email address information in an automated fashion absent either security concerns or mandatory subscription to a service by each party within a given email address list.
In accordance with the invention there is provided a method for updating an electronic a contact information database comprising the steps of:
a) sending at least an electronic mail message to a contact destination of at least one contact from a plurality of contacts stored within the electronic contact information database of a user; and
b) upon receiving a return message indicative of electronic mail message delivery failure, automatically flagging the contact destination as potentially expired within the contact information database.
In accordance with another aspect of the invention there is provided a method for updating an electronic contact information database wherein:
upon receiving an email message from a known contact using a previously unrecognized email address;
updating the contact information database to include the previously unrecognized email address in addition to the email address that is already stored;
wherein both addresses are associated with the contact.